Sunday Stock: iStockphoto Image of the Week

You may already be familiar with the folks at iStockphoto. They supplied 1000 high-resolution images for inclusion with CorelDRAW X4. And when you registered, they gave you credits towards the purchase of more images.

I know users are hesitant to create accounts sometimes because they don't want to get extra e-mail. I can't remember when I created my iStockphoto account, but it was probably at least two years ago. I do get 2-3 e-mails a week. Some are purely promotional, most have something of value. For example, one of them tells me about the free image of the week. That's right, once a week you can download a high quality image for free! Some of the images will be something you can use, others will be interesting though not useful in your line of work. I just make sure to download all of them and store them in a folder just in case. Once a month they also offer a free vector illustration for download.

Yes, you'll need to create a free account to download the freebies. I think it is a very fair trade-off to get the free images and illustrations.

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Photos Included in CorelDRAW X4 Greatly Improved

You looked over the feature list of the CorelDRAW X4 Graphics Suite and there were some things that probably caught your eye. As you got to the end of the list, some of the "extras" were listed.

In this post I'll specifically address the line reading "1,000 professional, high-resolution digital photos". Just to check, I looked at the press release for CorelDRAW X3 and the photos were simply lumped in with the clip art. How many of you saw this and jumped for joy? Probably not many and that's too bad because this is one of those hidden improvements.

The photos included with CorelDRAW X3 were stored in the JPEG 2000 format and their size in pixels was 768 x 512. They might be usable for a Web site, but there just wasn't enough detail there to use them in a print project.

Now we jump to CorelDRAW X4 and there is a huge improvement. Photos now are stored as JPEG files with minimal compression. Even better is that they are of a size that is usable for a lot more types of projects. All of them are 3000 pixels in the longest dimension. Also I feel there is a better selection of photos. This batch was licensed from the online stock agency, iStockphoto where you would pay $6-$10 each for the pictures Corel includes for free. Now obviously you aren't going to have a need for every one of these photos. Let's just assume that you have a need for even 50 of the 1000. That's a minimum of $300 you've saved by Corel including them for you.

One other cool feature in the installer is that you can have it "install" the "extra" content for you. This includes clip art, photos, tiles, patterns, fonts and all the other cool stuff that is normally hidden on the "other" discs. Now that Corel has shipped CorelDRAW X4 on a DVD, they can pack it with great content and make it easier to use.

Read the CorelDRAW X4 press release and see what else is new. When you are ready to order a copy, check out our CorelDRAW X4 page. We certainly appreciate your support in buying CorelDRAW X4 from our site.

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